Monday, September 5, 2016

Sometimes the best paintings only reveal half their narrative, leaving it up to a pair of eyes and a reckless imagination to fill in the rest. After seeing Ginny Casey's work in her show at 106 Greenlast Winter, I waited with bated breath, like you do with any good suspense, for more chapters of the story. Skipping ahead by asking for a drawing visit, I was excited to discover she was having a show at Half Gallery opening in the Fall. Her overflowing studio was prime for a drawing session, and, to my great pleasure, her beautiful new baby Lumin Ramona was there at the beginning of the visit. Throughout the day Casey walked the couple blocks home to nurse. Yet another reminder that being a fantastic painter and mother can and do go hand and hand.

The two unfinished paintings that remained in Ginny's studio were left up to a matter of color. Her delicately bold palette is one of the strongest parts of her work, and it's no wonder her finalizing moments come down to fine tuning it. Casey models her soft forms, often large enough to take over the entire canvas, by teetering between colors so close in value they are as precarious as the knife painted into the corner of her composition. The curved edges of her shapes keep up their mysterious flatness while alluding to spacial perspective with barely visible shadows and dark colors that anchor her backgrounds. Casey's perspectives flirt with abstraction like the vague floating forms in Milton Avery's painting or the dense vessels highlighted in a Morandi. Girth, hollowness, humor, contradiction; these are words that come to mind when I leave my preconceived ideas of still-life behind and get caught up in her world. And then a narrative begins to unfold. It is anywhere between a tumbling toy that sits on the shelf of a dusty thrift store to a deserted scene left with surreal truncations and pointing fingers.

With our cold jumbo seltzers in hand we had a lot of really intense belly laughs in between talks of her coming show and her new life in motherhood. I learn something new every time I visit a studio. This time I learned, so intimately, what it is like to work on a show with a newborn baby. Ginny Casey rocks. Don't miss "Play Things" which opens September 7th and is up until October 7th at Half Gallery. To see more of her work go to http://www.ginnycasey.com/paintings